
' 




-i 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 










UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 






THE MISTAKES 



OF 



ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, 



ON 



NATURE AND GOD. 



A SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM. 



BY 



GEORGE W. EDGETT 



THE MISTAKES 



OF 



ROBERT G. INGERSOLL 



ON 



NATURE AND GOD. 




BY 



jV 



GEORGE W. EDGETT. 






BOSTON : 

BEACON PRESS: THOMAS TODD, PRINTER, 

Corner Beacon and Somerset Sts. 

1881. 



9T- 



v 



<[& 



*t 



-P^&* 



COPYRIGHT, l88l, BY G W. EDGETT. 



MISTAKES OF INGERSOLL. 



Col. Robert G. Ingersoll has said that " felling forests is not 
the end of agriculture, driving pirates from the sea is not all there 
is of commerce." That is so, and though he may have done some 
good work in felling ghosts, clearing up the wilderness of hell, pro- 
ducing skulls in testimony of human progress, and pursuing the 
formal gods of the past to the end of all their power, yet when he 
leaves that field of labor, to pursue the Supreme Absolute to the 
extremity of nothing, unless of organic nature, he is reentering the 
wilderness of ancient idolatry for his own system, with this differ- 
ence ; that his gods are a supposed infinity of things, while the 
ancients only took a few things for convenience' sake. 

He is on the wrong trail, and that is what we propose to demon- 
strate. 

He says, " A god must not only be material, but he must be an 
organism, capable of changing other forms of force into thought- 
force." He says, " A deity outside of nature exists in nothing, and 
is nothing." He thus reverses the creative theory, and falls into 
the opposite absurdity. He asserts material infinitude and infini- 
tude of worlds, probably to give his chief organic god, or union of 
such gods, a chance of infinity. 

But materiality, worlds and their products, so far as we know, are 
only individual things ; and it is evident that individual parts can 
form no portion of absolute infinity, or that no limitless aggrega- 
tion of parts can fill that one single mode of infinitude called 
space. 

All organic forms are divisible into parts. Gas, air, rocks, trees, 
men, everything we know, can be divided into separate parts. Then, 
if such things could make an infinite, a part of infinity might be 
measured and divided. If this be true, we come to conceive of 
infinity as capable of being cut in two. And this gives us two 
infinites ; for if you deny infinity as to one part, you must deny it 
as to the other, and also as to both parts together, each part being 
thus declared finite. 

This brings us to the absurdity of one infinitude twice as great 
as either of those which compose it. 



In the same manner, if we consider countless millions of parts 
as constituting infinity, we must conceive it as millions of times 
greater than each of those parts ; and in order to maintain the idea 
of an infinitude so made, we are still compelled to assert that each 
of those parts is also infinite. 

So, including all things, whether capable of thought or not, even 
though imagined as one thinking being, they could not constitute 
Infinite Intelligence, for infinitude of organic form is impossible. 
Hence we are forced to conclude, either that there is no infinite, or 
that Infinite Intelligence, if it does exist, can only be conceived of 
as indivisible, incapable of increase or diminution, existing by 
virtue of no organism, absent from no needle point of space. 

Where stands the block of granite, God was ; and if not still 
there, each instant the same, then has He changed to granite ? 
But if granite expresses Him by form, you again come to the ab- 
surdity of making Him divisible, or finite. And if He is displaced 
by the granite, then He loses so much of His omnipresence, or is 
constantly diminished by just so much in the extent of His infinity, 
which is an absurdity just as great as the other. Therefore, we 
again see that the Intelligence or Spirit called God, to be in all 
and through all, forever formulating matter in shapes and ways 
beyond the wildest human fancy, could neither be caused nor con- 
stituted of material form. 

When a material god, or none at all, is asserted, the philosopher 
testifies whereof he knows not ; like a witness who swears to the 
non-existence of something, because he never knew it. The little 
speck that he does know, superficially by cause and effect, is made 
a sample of the boundless all that he does not know. He makes 
nature the asylum of his ignorance, in reasoning of God, the same 
as others make the will of God their refuge, in reasoning of nature. 

Like the boy who imagined the end of the world and set out to 
find it, one learns a multitude of things as he travels on in thought, 
and all egotism is sure to diminish as the universe seems to increase. 
But when coming forever to the same point in the circle, whereof 
we try to find the end, why not learn like the boy, by experience, 
or by the efforts of humanity for thousands of years, that the object 
aimed at does not exist as we by inheritance supposed ; that God 
has not a formal nature, and that organism, with all its products 
and refinements, cannot involve, nor pertain to, Absolute Being ? 

Let us see if this will not relieve us of the absurdities we come 



to in other ways. Admit the eternality of matter, force, and 
motion, and so escape the absurd conclusions of the creative theory 
on the one hand, and meet the logic of the atheist on the other. 

One absurdity thus avoidable is this : since it is self-evident 
that no part of creation could have been something and nothing at 
the same instant, all things must have been made of something 
called matter ; and if there was nothing in existence before crea- 
tion except God, then it follows that Himself was the matter where- 
of the universe was created. 

And we also avoid another error of belief that men fell into from 
the old theory, that an act of human will and faith, by the power 
of God, might create or change things, the same as He was sup- 
posed to have done from the beginning ; or, for example, that any 
other mountain besides a mountain of thought might be removed 
by perfect faith. 

Now let us admit that throughout nature, between all forms, as 
between the roiling stars, there is an actual material power that 
belts them all together and apart in equilibrium, by an eternal force 
that forever eludes the analysis and pursuit of thought. And sup- 
pose just here that we are met by the consequent fact, demonstrated 
by science, that matter is impenetrable and not divisible, or only 
divisible by particles and not in its infinity. Then, in the same 
manner that we proved the Infinite God to be indivisible, or not 
composed of parts, so may we prove by a like division of parts, that 
no limitless number of parts can constitute the infinite essence of 
matter. 

Then it is inquired, How does infinite matter in essence differ 
from Infinite God in essence, or can there be more than one in- 
finite ? We answer, Yes ; not only more than one, but. to make an 
absolute and free infinity, there must be an infinity of infinites. 

Imagine a line running through infinite space. Its extension ad 
infinitum goes on forever beyond our comprehension, and we call 
that line infinite. And you may conceive of parallel lines ad 
infinitum, each one also infinite, or an endless number of infinite 
lines not parallel, that are also possible. And so of planes in in- 
finite extension, and so of circles. Commence with the circle of 
a silver dollar, and go on increasing the size of your ideal circles 
for a life-time, or till you come to the conception of one inclosing 
all visible stars, and you will never come to conceive the end of all 
possible circles, and so we call that idea of circles infinite ; and 



this not only with reference to size, but with reference to the 
limitless number possible, of the same size as each of the others. 
Or, to illustrate by another example, consider the infinite relations 
of effect, from every atom of all material forms ; and then follow 
on from small to great, from Earth to stars, and know, of Mind, all 
things are infinite, in solar systems infinite. 

This theory of the infinity of infinite ideas is the only one pos- 
sible that does not conflict with the fact that no infinite can be 
made up of those parts by which we form our conceptions, as we 
have already seen of that called the infinite extension of matter. 
And as nothing can be a part of infinity, so nothing known can be 
infinite in itself, but only as it is an idea of infinite mind in the 
mode of space. To deny infinity in this manner were to deny the 
infinite altogether ; for if no part can complete an infinite, nor by 
any means be itself infinite, then there is no infinite. 

Now as to matter in essence, Mr. Ingersoll admits that it is just 
as much unknown, by evidence in the forms of nature, as the God 
that he denies ; but yet he declares that matter, in organic form 
capable of thought, is the only God possible ! 

With more cautious wisdom, the agnostic says of the two un- 
known, I am unable to deny or assert God of matter that I do not 
know, nor can I deny His existence otherwise because I do not 
know this. It may be said that names signify nothing as to the 
unknown, since differences must also be unknown. But by com- 
parison of such conceptions as Supreme Intelligence and matter, 
we only follow the differences found in ourselves. Knowing 
nothing of two origins, manifest in different productions or in one, 
justifies no sound reason in supposing them to be the same when 
followed into the unknown. 

But let us resume our hypothesis. By every form of nature, even 
unto worlds, we are made primarily conscious that formal matter is 
not an infinity of things, each one or all together, co-extensive with 
space ; and reason tells us it can only be so by existence in the all- 
pervading ideas of Infinite Mind, just as lines, planes, and circles 
exist, in their infinite ideas. But then it is alleged that ideas of 
infinite circles, as well as all ideas of the numberless variety of 
other things, are only forms of the attribute of thought ; and thought 
itself is an attribute of matter, existing, so far as we know, only in 
connection with organized forms of matter as a cause. 

Now, sweep humanity and all its knowledge from Earth, or blot 



this world of forms from existence, and would it destroy the true 
ideas of it ? No, such a result can no more be conceived of than 
a first creation from nothing ; because the indestructible matter 
which assumed the nature of this world had to contain the ideas 
of it ; or, in other words, it had to be actuated by the undeniable 
power to produce just exactly what it has produced. But perhaps 
Mr. Ingersoll will deny that things become what they do become ? 
Possibly this modern god-killer may only say that things do not 
become what they do become, according to any certain ideas. But, 
to be consistent, he must at least say that all things become what 
they do become, not because of any previous ideas before they 
began material form — not because of any ideas without which 
things could not be — oh no, but because nothing prevented them 
(prevented what ?) from becoming what they did become. 

Most magnificent reason ! But what prevented or prevents all 
material from remaining as it was or as it is ? Without a spirit- 
power, were life possible, or the struggle for any untried form of 
life, and the struggle to retain it against all resistance, easier than 
its non-existence ? Then what, pray, made eternal matter set out to 
appear in different form from what it was, or to seek new relations 
in form of life ? Follow the inquiry, and what makes an animal- 
cule, a fish, a monkey, or a man, work about in different directions ? 
Common sense tells us, it is all because everything exists in other 
attributes of Thinking Being, as well as the material, and because 
those attributes are in very self the ideas expressed in the material, 
according to conditions affecting their union. 

It would appear indeed even more reasonable to assert that 
organized matter exists, so far as we know, only in connection with 
ideas as a cause, than to say that ideas exist only with organism as 
a cause. If either infinite attribute, mind or matter, could be con- 
ceived as being prior to the other, ideas would seem to have priority 
of power in the lines of creation, as far superior to the materials 
used as the mind of the artist is superior to the paints with which 
he gives us the blooming landscape. 

Section II. 

As to most things in nature, their very being, their embodiment 
of ideas and causes, are forever hid from them, for want of intel- 
ligent consciousness. And his immediate causes are hidden from 
man until long after he is born, when he learns, by hearsay, to 
whom his formation is due. 



8 



But the ultimate appearance of man's personal perception and 
thought, after the idea of his formation is expressed in his growth, 
is evidence of the fact that all the ideas involved in his being had 
existed forever, in relative lines of infinite sequences, just as con- 
clusive as any evidence that the material had eternally existed by 
which his physical body came into personality. This will be ap- 
parent if we consider the nature of infinity — that nothing can be 
taken from it nor anything added to it — that nothing can be taken 
from, nor added to, either infinite Thinking Being or infinite matter, 
whether said to be one and the same or not. And because we 
know nothing except by material organism, as to object or subject, 
is no proof that what knows had no existence before it knew. 

There are no possibles that do not exist previous to their demon- 
stration. If there were, the nature of possibilities would depend 
upon demonstration, whereas the dependence is exactly the reverse. 
So, to be demonstrated, or to demonstrate itself, a possible thing 
must in some form previously exist ; and all the ideas demon- 
strated in process of nature must have had a previous existence, 
ad infinitum, by the infinity of relations, in the infinite of Thinking 
Being. 

And hence, we know that organism is not the source of thought, 
Thinking Being, or God made manifest, nor even the cause of that 
absurd god of whom Mr. Ingersoll claims to be a part, and of 
whose great magnitude we might learn more, if we only knew what 
consequent portion the Ingersoll part is of the whole god. 

Honor bright, now, let us follow atheism beyond its own 
resources, by use of its own logic. No form of thought can exist 
without the same form of matter, and no form of matter without 
the same form of thought ; that is, one cannot exist without the 
other, whether embodied in a stone, a vegetable, or animal life ; 
and therefore, neither one can be the cause or effect of the other, 
in the thing itself. Hence it is concluded that mind and matter 
are one. But do not stop here. Both forms are the effect of their 
union, each one of which, followed through disappearing causes, 
like parallel lines, will never meet as one and the same, though 
both are mutually dependent for parallel existence. 

For comparison, we might liken the union of thought and organ- 
ism to the union of different chemicals. The product appears to 
be a new thing, of different power, one and the same throughout, 
till its identity is lost to view by a disunion into the two compound 



elements of it. And by the same process of analysis and separa- 
tion, the individual identity of each compound element is also 
apparently destroyed. 

But the effect of their union is not in the individual factors of it 
as actual causes, — although they so exist, in unity, by means of 
some previous union, enabled in the same manner, by another idea 
in matter. 

This will be made perfectly plain further on, in testing the 
material elements and theory of Lord Bacon. 

And thus we know that things, of themselves together, with no 
other involving nor enabling power, can neither make nor constitute 
the effect of unified sameness. Then this must be the result of an 
unknown means in which they exist, and without which nothing in 
the universe could be as it is. And since nothing in the universe 
is known to us except such effects and results, we are driven to 
the conclusion that nature exists by virtue of this unknown means. 
These things illustrate that all we can know is the product of rela- 
tions, not the absolute Substance ; that no two, nor forty, nor count- 
less things, as individuals, can compose or involve the actual Sub- 
stance, which enables all relations, all unions, and all forces to 
produce what they do produce in Thinking Being. Hence, we 
declare that nature is in God, not God in nature. 

Matter, force, and motion, or cause and effect, being admitted, 
Mr. Ingersoll claims that the universe needs no God to account for 
its phenomena. Can he explain or touch with the utmost reach of 
reason, by all that is known of organism, force, motion, and natural 
selection, the anterior and intervening agency whereby a so-called 
cause is made the same as its effect in different things ? Can he 
explain one single little phenomenon of nature without the presence 
of that Intelligence called God ? We defy him or any other man to 
do it. Tell us how matter could produce two different animals from 
life-cells of the same material, without the presence of their perpet- 
ual idea, — without the presence of Thinking Being, — and then you 
have explained all the phenomena of the universe without a God. 
Till then it well befits an honest man to do obedient homage to the 
Supreme Power in which he is, be he Ingersoll or Christian. 

Original sameness or nothingness of different things is denied 
or admitted with equal assurance, on account of confused ideas 
arising from consciousness of relative existence, and an utter mis- 
conception of those phenomena that demonstrate the necessity of 
absolute self-existence. Because no thought nor particle, in mind 



IO 

or matter, can appear by our senses without relation in sameness 
and fitness to our capacity, ignorance supposes that the destruction 
of known forms or the end of known relations is an end of the 
same differences. 

As to known quantities, we say of things, each being equal to 
another thing, they are equal to each other. This axiom, applied 
to the unknown essence of various life and products, has been the 
basis of much sophistry in metaphysics. Failing to find anything 
but material as cause of itself, the atheist assumes that things and 
combinations which are in every respect of atoms the same must be 
known as exactly alike. For example, it is supposed that two 
things composed of the same proportion of the same constituent 
elements must be alike. What do we find by analysis? We find 
two different spices constituted of the same things in the same pro- 
portion. We find the oils of citron, lemon, orange, black pepper, 
juniper, and other things, are each ioo parts, exactly 88.24 carbon 
and 11.76 hydrogen. We find the constituents of common street 
gas and the oil of roses are the same, each compound atom of both 
being four atoms of hydrogen and four atoms of carbon. Chemistry 
undertakes to explain these phenomena by assuming a different 
arrangement of the unknown atoms. But what we assert is — the 
eternal difference of the essential ideas which those compound 
atoms express, in different things. Diversity of flowers nourished 
by the same elements; variety of men, — black, white, and otherwise 
different ; graphite, black charcoal, and the brilliant diamond, each 
one pure carbon ; none of these, nor any of the multiform differ- 
ences in the world, are to be explained by simple elements in the 
alphabet of nature as known to science. 

And just here we see the fallacy of Lord Bacon's philosophy, 
which was one of the primary lessons in evolution, of scientists 
like Darwin, Huxley, and Haeckel. As a vast number of words 
are formed by combinations of the simple alphabet, so he sought 
the antecedent cause of all natural phenomena in an alphabet of 
nature, as it were, or in a limited number of simple elemental 
natures, from which all varieties were deemed derivable, and to be 
accounted for as secondary effects. This theory was the grand 
center of his system ; so he gave us a list of simple natures as the 
grand axis of all research, asserting that the end of all human 
knowledge in natural science might soon be arrived at by a few 
known causes, or by his elementary alphabet and order of induc- 
tion. 



II 

But the fact of different ideas or things expressed or produced in 
one simple element, or in the same amounts of two elements, proves 
a reverse order of creative causation. It proves that the works of 
nature, its laws, and simple elements are to be studied and known, 
not by these elements themselves, but by the properties, forms, and 
forces in which they are. For example : the character of carbon, 
as being charcoal, graphite, and diamond, could not be known with- 
out first having these things, whether we knew of it in many other 
forms and uses or not. And so of the other simple elements, sixty- 
four or more in number, as to any form of each ; for it is already 
found of nearly all, that each one is allotropic, or in different forms, 
qualities, and conditions, like carbon. 

And if this order of discovery by diverse things as to their sole 
constituent or as to the nature of any one element is necessary, it 
must follow with still greater force that it is likewise necessary as 
to the like and unlike combinations of different elements in all the 
more complex varieties of nature. And so we come to the fact that 
universal phenomena or the ideas in Substance, whereof we can never 
find beginning nor end, are themselves the alphabet of our knowl- 
edge, instead of their simple elements, as taught by Bacon. It thus 
appears that the antecedent cause of distinctive properties and 
forms in nature is not in their simple elements, or combinations of 
them, but in the distinct ideas that involve those elements. 

Hence we know that different things are not made so by the 
elements ; that equalities of like elements, singly or in chemical 
unities, are not necessarily equal things or the same things ; that 
different creations may be the same material compound. 

And so, to whatever extent things may be traced in materiality for 
causes, whether by natural selection (which proves a selecting intel- 
ligence), by chemical action, force, heat, motion, or otherwise, the 
same necessity will forever appear, as to each and all, for the abso- 
lute existence of Thinking Being. 

For example : aside from generic diversity or variety in the same 
elements, — which no science, no chemistry can explain, — what 
makes the science of chemistry in any way possible, by fixing the 
exact proportion of combining constituents in any certain chemical 
compound ? Or, to amplify our inquiry, while different things may 
exist in the same proportion of the same elements, what makes the 
law that each of those things, as a chemical compound, is always 
so composed ? Plainly, the elements involved in the law are not 



12 

makers of the law of composition, by which they are also used in 
the same proportion for different creations. The question is, then, 
as to the action of chemical atoms ; for instance, not what makes 
the compound of four atoms carbon and four atoms hydrogen al- 
ways the fragrant oil of roses, (for the same compound is also the 
illuminating property of coal gas) ; but what makes the oil of roses 
always to be so composed ? Or what makes the nature of pure 
water always to consist, in weight, of eight parts oxygen and one 
part hydrogen ? Dr. Dalton's theory of different, indivisible, un- 
changeable atoms of matter will not answer these inquiries, for it 
does not agree with all the facts of differential chemistry, nor allow 
that power of change necessary for diversities of phenomena. 

And thus we are driven again to the necessity of assuming the 
mastery of ideas, in a self-existent Intelligence that involves all 
laws, all causes, all materials. Man himself is one of those ideas, 
and science can neither make nor imitate an effect in nature, unless 
by means of ideas that already exist in matter. 

Chemical force, colors, light, and heat, in the unity of a sunbeam, 
are not made different powers by the material media whereby we 
know them, either here or in the sun. To assume the contrary 
were no less absurd than to say that colors have only a prismatic 
existence, because we knew nothing of them in pure light, till seen 
by means of a prism ; and the very convertibility of forces into 
one another — as of magnetism, electricity, light, heat, and chemical 
action — indicates their elemental sameness, differentiated by the 
vis viva of infinite ideas. 

So by every demonstration we come to this conclusion : All things 
we know of things — their properties, forms, relations, and differ- 
ences — depend objectively, as to being known, upon the elements, 
upon which they do not depend for origin or actual existence, as 
already shown. Therefore, the destruction of known forms, prop- 
erties, relations, and differences is not to be known or supposed as 
an end of the same differences in essence unknown, of which they 
are. 

Thus, in every direction, far and near, beyond the known and the 
unknown of nature, we come to that Unknown called God, which 
Mr. Ingersoll asserts is growing less and less by the more we know. 
If he would take the trouble to look beyond the limit of his own 
conceit, he would feel that Unknown growing greater and greater, 
just in proportion as nature seems to, by the more he knows. 



13 



Section III. 

As constituting the whole of anything, from an atom onward, 
men name its elements, so far as they know, and call the total of 
them one thing, like water, clay, air, or man. And they say the 
oxygen in air and the oxygen in a drop of man-blood are the same ; 
and so they go on, till the same things are supposed to be found 
in earth, air, and water that make the body of a man. Then, lo ! 
at last some great evolutionist has discovered that a heap of dirt, 
vegetables, and insects are the same as man, except in form and 
distribution of parts ! 

Thus it is, from the elements as cause, men come to reason of 
the absolute God by one infinite attribute ; and after they have made 
Him up by means of the universe, they can again resolve all things 
into the same attribute or force, as the cause of its own forms. 

But by far the greater class in sophistry fancy that all things 
were created from nothing, by a Supreme Power of infinite fullness 
that never had a beginning. Such a perfect self-contradiction calls 
for no argument. An ignoramus, filled with wonder as to the 
origin of rain-drops, makes discovery of the ocean, evaporation, 
and the courses of the wind. Able to go no further for sources, 
he declares, no less wisely than the more learned, who also fix the 
limit of nature by what they know, that water was made from 
nothing. 

Thus it is that God comes to be conceived of as responsibly 
connected with everything in the universe as a first cause, instead 
of absolute and free existence involving infinite attributes ; and 
then comes the presumptuous, crazy work of trying to harmonize 
and justify the ways of God. 

When we said, therefore, that organism is not the cause of 
thought, but that neither one could exist without the other, we said 
no more than that forms of thought and forms of matter do not 
involve absolute being, of which there can be no parts in any attri- 
bute. Therefore we do not refer them to any beginning, from one 
infinite source ; but only say that they exist in infinite continuations, 
multiplications, and changes, expressed by different attributes in 
the same individual organism, and that, as an individual expression, 
the individuality of the one could not exist, as known, without the 
individuality of the other. 

This must be apparent, as well as the fact that actual Substance 
is not involved in individual personality, inasmuch as it is just as 



H 

possible that a thing should not be as that it should be. Take, for 
example, any formation like man, such as we may conceive might 
have been destroyed in its germ. It could not be known to itself 
nor any other individual like it by the development so prevented. 
So far as being known to man, then, by individual relations that 
never existed, that is impossible. But, at the same time, in the 
infinite relations of absolute Substance and Thinking Being it does 
exist, otherwise it could not possibly be among an infinity of possi- 
bilities. What is the nature of those possibilities ? 

To us, who know nothing except by limited relations, things are 
possible or impossible by degrees according to numbers involved in 
production ; as in a lottery of chance, wherein the result becomes 
one certainty. But make every possible thing infinite or give it an 
infinity of chances, and then we must conceive all possible things 
as already existing of Substance in form of ideas. 

Then give an idea of man, or any part of man, an endless num- 
ber of chances to find visible expression, and that idea, or that idea 
of any part with every other part in the same manner, are sure to 
find expression. And so all things possible are certain in the ideas 
of Infinite Being, and appear to us according to the law of possibil- 
ities in nature. By this law, the production of one in any material 
species is evidence just as strong as many — one man, as the 
whole human race is — proof that the infinite idea exists. 

Do you ask for one of the infinity of chances wherein men may 
be without knowing it themselves and without being known to 
exist by others ? Without assuming, for the present, a case before 
the demonstrated fact,' it occurs even in physical form, when all 
are sound asleep, forgotten and forgetful of themselves and their 
fellows. There lies one certain man asleep, as much unknown to 
himself as though he had never been born. The idea of that man 
is surely there in one place, no less than when he was awake. You 
see him, and the idea of that man is in every one of you that know 
him as a man, when you sleep. And so, as an individual idea of 
that man, it must be in all those who have the idea of you, because 
you possess the idea of that first man. And so we know that the 
idea of all men is in every man, and the idea of every man that 
ever lived is in all men ; and hence it must be in Thinking Being 
or in God, in whom all men are everywhere present, as an infinite 
idea, ever ready, in germ or impress of rightly conditioned matter, 
for the inception of its visible form. 

And now to return to that first man, either asleep or dead. We 



15 

know that the idea of him is just as perpetual as the human race is, at 
least ; only not knowing that the man is in us of idea, of Substance 
the same, we say he is dead. But as he is multiplied in our ideas, 
the same as bodies multiply in their effects, we say he yet lives of 
the ideas of Substance, and of the ideas of those ideas, infinitely 
extended, diversified, and multiplied, as one of the infinite ideas of 
God, because there can be no such thing as a last effect of any- 
thing. 

But how before man was? No man ever saw the first of his own 
or any genus made, and no proof was ever found, either among living 
species or in thirty thousand fossiliferous varieties of the past, that 
one genus becomes another by evolution. All formed of the same 
elements, to live by similar means, elementary likeness is inevitable. 
And as to rudimental forms in one genus, of parts that belong to 
the uses of another, they afford no more evidence of any genus 
growing from another than they do of its own departure from a 
more perfectly distinct type. But by every hypothesis, the aggres- 
sive and assimilating encroachment of concurrent forms, everywhere 
manifest in a tendency toward likeness, indicates the necessary 
existence of cotemporary or co-eternal diversity of generic ideas, 
by whatever means or in whatever order they may have come into 
material expression. Then, suppose it may have taken a mill- 
ion years of changing form in the infinite lottery of material life, 
by outgrowing some parts and developing others, before the idea of 
any man or any part of man came to be expressed in anything that 
called itself a man on Earth ; would that change the. eternal verity 
of the infinite idea, thus gradually assuming the form of flesh 
and personal consciousness ? What difference does it make how 
many animal, mineral, and vegetable unions it may have taken to 
produce that form, involved in universal nature ? We know it was 
once without visible inception, like a thought that finds expression 
in the chiseled marble, and we know that, by use of the consum- 
mate energies in nature, its idea was produced in what we call man, 
— in a revelation to our senses of what must have been in abso- 
lute existence in order to be so revealed. 

By every theory, is not each instant of the ages complete in itself, 
and everything fitted for what follows ? Is there any gap in the 
infinite, any point where nothing begins to be something, where a 
non-existent form begins to be an existent form ? It only appears 
so at the points of passage from one attribute into another, — from 
the unknown into the known. Trace man back by fancy, if you 



i6 

please, through the union of monkeys or any of the myriad forms 
of nature, and say that they were all converging to make a man for 
many thousand years perhaps. If true, it signifies nothing as evi- 
dence of no God, for every step concedes the very Intelligence 
denied. It matters not how, or by what especial material link, or 
progenitor in creation, man might have been at last produced, — 
here he is, of existing intelligence undeniable, and not enabled by 
self-creation. 

To combine by natural descent the perfection of visible form, 
and the consequent mental power, possessing in the form of ideas 
all things in nature that we know by such connection in ourselves, 
— for the descent, we say, of such personified intelligence, — it might 
have been necessary thus to include in man all those things of 
nature. But, nevertheless, his existence proves that he always did 
exist among the forms of infinite attributes, otherwise we have at 
some point the absurdity of an effect without a cause ; a man made 
by nothing, just as some people think the world was made, by the 
union of relative nothings. And even in man's feeble conception, 
it would seem quite as creditable to Thinking Being, and no less 
wonderful, if such an epitome of all there is on Earth was produced 
in a natural way, whether in the line of one genus or not, rather 
than all at once out of clay into which God breathed the breath of 
life. 

But, in spite of this fact, Mr. Ingersoll asserts that God does not 
appear until, for one single instant at least, the process of an infinite 
idea has been stopped ! To my mind, this would prove the absence 
of God instead of His existence. And indeed, if it be asserted that 
the material process of certain ideas in Thinking Being has stopped 
with the extinction of any genus or species in nature, we do not 
urge it as evidence of God, but, on the contrary, to maintain our 
view of Supreme Being, we say the conditions of material expres- 
sion have passed away, but not the ideas ; and so we assert, what 
no one will deny, that, in a recurrence of the same conditions, those 
ideas would again express the same forms of life in materiality. 
Miracles, for one of which Mr. Ingersoll passes around his hat 
among enlightened men, are not the test of reason's God immutable, 
but of heathen gods. 

Section IV. 

And now, suppose we admit for a moment the ground of atheism, 
that there is nothing besides materiality, — that all mind is a material 



'7 

emanation of organism ; then all such organism must be supplied, 
or continually made of the same emanation, and we have visible 
>form made of invisible form, or material made of thought, both the 
same thing, thinking Substance. Concede the most absurd claim 
materialism could make, and say that in the universal interchange 
of matter, an amount equal to the whole world, or equal to all its 
material forces, has already been used a thousand times by conver- 
sion into thought; then were not the thought of man in every 
particle of Earth, and every particle of Earth in the thought of man, 
still enlarging the view of man as an idea even in materialism ? 

And if mind is such a refinement of matter into force, or bread 
into the spirit of poetry, as Mr. Ingersoll thinks, then it is an ex- 
tension or refined duplicate of the same union found in the body. 
In other words, the body is continually becoming the same as the 
mind, and the mind is continually becoming the same as its effect, 
and so on, ad infinitum ; and this, not only in the circle of organic 
life, but by effect in extension through all else. If this be not so 
admitted, then must we come to the absurd conclusion of a last 
effect in the infinite circle of extension : thus denying altogether 
the infinite succession of cause and effect of emanations, that must 
reach throughout the universe of such thinking being, as the effect 
of a planet or a particle must reach through space. 

This brings us back to the fact that everything is infinitely ex- 
tended by the relations in infinite Substance, and that the mind or 
soul in man is likewise infinite or immortal in the infinite of Think- 
ing Being. And this must necessarily be equally true whether 
matter and absolute Thinking Being are inseparably one and the 
same or not. 

How can we illustrate this wonderful conception of God that we 
thus come to even through materialism? Shut your eyes, take an 
orange in your hand ; and now, in what part of your conscious being 
is that orange ? Is it only in one place against the fingers ? Is it 
not in every particle of nerve and flesh that connects it through you 
as a thinking form of being ? Only think of it, and where is it as 
an idea ? Is it not in itself, in you, and everywhere you will think 
of its being? Think of oranges and other things together; are not 
all and each one wherever your mind is, no less than in every 
atom of your enabling brain, as forms of thought ? 

And even so, not only must be the forms of ideas, but the Sub- 
stance of which they are, through all and in all, of the infinite of 
Thinking Being. Forms of Substance we can know, but not the 



i8 

Substance of which forms are. Take away all forms, mental and 
material, and yet Substance whereof they are remains the same. 
Pursue this forever as the infinite involving all forms, and you come 
no nearer to knowing actual Substance in esse than you are this 
instant, because you are of Substance. If Substance were of you 
or in you by form, as body or thoughts are, you could know it ; but 
nothing, so far as we know, can know itself per se, free from rela- 
tion. A thought cannot know itself except by another thought. 
A brick embodies thought that can only be known by another 
thought like the one it expresses ; and this thought, like the first, can 
only be known by another thought like it, and so on without end ; 
and thus we are forced to conclude again that there is no first cause 
of anything, but that all things are infinite, of the infinite attributes 
in Thinking Being, or in God. 

Do you ask me how Thinking Being, in such infinite sequences 
of effect, can understand itself, having no possible relations outside 
of itself by which to know itself ? Of self we know that there is 
knowing where we know. And if you were a million times greater 
intelligence than now, involving what you now are, you could sup- 
pose no place in such intelligence where there were no knowing. 
Conceived of thus as Intelligence in extension ad inft?iitum, and God 
can be no further a conception of reason. Then ask you how God 
can be infinities unified ! one understanding absolute ! one harmony 
wherein all seeming discords blend ! Ask the parasite in a particle 
of my flesh how my blood circulates to give it life, or how I am 
understood by myself ! Ask the animalcule in a drop of water 
tumbling over Niagara how such confusion can be the sublimity of 
law and order ! Ask the monarch of the ocean to explain his uni- 
verse of water, whereof all things seem subject to his use ! Ask 
the lion in his native jungle, where all other life appeared to be for 
him until he met his master, how man, his infinite superior, can 
understand the laws of his own being ! 

God is not the passing creature of a union such as man — not 
intelligent as man is — He is Intelligence itself, impossible to know. 
Not inruling nor overruling like a man, but involving all, He is 
neither thought nor will, in any human sense, nor changeable by 
faith, in which all men are different ; but He is the living Spirit in 
which all faith must be reflected of itself, according to the nature 
of the man. 

To say that such Being, of which we are, does not understand 
itself, because we know nothing but by relation, is to deny our own 



19 

existence. It would be like the intelligent insect in our flesh, who 
lives by our life in his own universe, denying that we know any- 
thing, because there is no especial care over his life. It would be 
worse than a shadow denying its. cause ; more foolish than a form 
claiming to be the origin of itself ; more absurd than a sculptured 
monument asserting self-creation ; because we know that we exist, 
of intelligence in form, and we know that we can trace to no begin- 
ning nor ending the order of intelligence in matter from which we 
came and to which we go. 

4 

Section V. 

In endless varieties of life, like begets like, of misery as well as 
joy; and many people are inquiring in the name of suffering inno- 
cence, if all is not as the atheist supposes, by chance instead of 
God. We answer no ; not even though God were the blind force 
of materiality that atheism claims. No matter how or why man 
makes a certain use of partial freedom ; in himself as individual, 
class, or genus, will he find the execution of the general laws inev- 
itable, for happiness or misery. Compensation for all conditions, 
though universal instead of individual, is, however, everywhere pos- 
sible ; and one whom we think lowest in material blessedness, may 
become the happiest of Mind. But any waiver of laws for indi- 
vidual relief, would contradict the law universal, and so destroy all 
law, all unity of government. In spite of this fact, Mr. Ingersoll 
says that all is chance, or " might be any other way as well as the 
way it is." Too much engrossed by details, the universal spirit of 
the law is lost. 

As to the endless diversity of ideas, forms, and lives, forever 
moving, merging, changing, like begetting like, judge this by intro- 
spection. You find in the universe of your own mind, inside your 
single skull, dead memories, like gold, like rocks, and trees. You 
find form following form, men, mountains, lakes, and cities, in instan- 
taneous connection of concurring or conflicting thought. All are 
different forms, in size, color, and quality ; but all exist thus, by 
means of the one material, your brain ; just as nature exists, in 
successive lines, all infinite, of the Substance of Thinking Being. 
The utter difference, aside from such likeness, is this : God's attri- 
butes in nature are the unknown Substance itself, of which our 
ideas are only personal forms, made by combination and reflection 
through human attributes, to correspond with their ideates. 

So we realize two kinds of like ideas in Substance — one being 



20 

in material form, the other its extension in mental form — neither 
of which can be known except as it exists in the other, or in some- 
thing else. Therefore, the way in which all life, and every variety 
of form, visible or invisible, material or immaterial, follow every- 
where at the same time in Thinking Being, seems to be more nearly 
illustrated by a human mind than any other way. It indicates the 
fact that all the varieties of nature, while related through every 
change, as being of the same Substance, are different, without 
beginning or end of difference, as being the ideas of Substance, in 
Thinking Being or in God. 

From a grain of sand all the way to man, throughout the vege- 
table, insect, or animal kingdom, everything in the world, or in the 
universe, directs itself by the intelligence of itself, in the power of 
something else, that also directs itself by its own nature, in some- 
thing else, that is in something else, and so on to infinity. Each 
thing then, and therefore all things, exist in something else inclusive 
of them, without the existence of which they could never appear. 
And now we see a paradox, that becomes an utter absurdity, unless 
we admit the existence of Thinking Being. What is that without 
which a thing could never appear ? It is itself, and nothing else ; 
not in material form but in Substance. We have this fact then : 
each thing is in the same absolute existence that all things are in, 
or nothing can be without itself, carried from cause to effect, infi- 
nitely extended in the Substance of Thinking Being. 

One form of life then, and all forms, must exist of Thinking 
Being ; not only like your personal ideas of them, but further to 
illustrate, like every particle of your brain, all which is said to be one 
and the same of material, whether involved in a single thought, or 
in a multitude of different thoughts. Thus every creation is. of the 
infinite concurrence in God's attributes. 

And here we come to. conceive of the Supreme Absolute, as 
involving each thing and all things, from the sparrow to the man, 
from the world to the universe. And thus we may begin to realize 
how it is that all things and all intelligence are of Intelligence in 
essence, or of God, in the immutable laws of Absolute Being. 

When the atheistic bug stands in the door-yard of the Lord's cre- 
ation, and from the summit of his presumption says, " no God ! " 
why not say of himself, no bug, no man, because he tries in vain 
to understand the mystery of life ? 

When he cries out shame upon disease inherited by innocence, 
shame upon earthquakes and volcanoes that bury men alive, shame 



21 

on yellow fever, small-pox, famine, pestilence, deformity and death, 
shame on life that feeds on life, "making every tooth a tombstone," 
why not learn that individual death is no misfortune to the universe, 
that all is life in God, that partial evil in a single world, as in the 
proper law of nations, must be universal good ? 

From one billion four hundred million people on earth, sixty- 
eight lives are lost each minute and seventy are born. With every 
pulse a life is lost, and another one appears. Nature's pulse is life 
and death alike. And on account of life's misfortunes, or because 
all life is not a steady joy secure from danger, would he arraign the 
universal laws, as though they were especially for man ? If human 
life is good, as proved by every struggle for it first and last, can the 
law of death, essential to it, or in which it is, that makes life possi- 
ble, be bad ? If any miserable life does not justify the necessary 
constitution of the world, in relation to itself, death does it even 
in the individual case. 

The whole difficulty is here : people think of God as a first great 
cause, instead of Absolute Existence, free from cause, eternal in all 
attributes. He is looked for as an outside individual of supreme 
influence, instead of that Being in whom, of whom, and by whom, 
all other being is, and is contained. 

It is impossible to know what we do not possess in our own 
nature. We are only conscious of our own limited attributes by 
relation of what we have in ourselves, to that which is in something 
else. As a thing is red, we have color ; as it is hard or soft, we 
have quality in feeling ; as it is round, we have form ; as it is sour, 
we have taste. A concord of sounds in harmony with what one 
has, is music. To another it may be discord, on account of his 
having more or less in relation to music. The rose is fragrant only 
as we have smell. The perfume that is pleasant to one is offensive 
to another. So we might go on in the relation of similar and dif- 
ferent things, tracing them into endless combinations, to find noth- 
ing existing in each individual knowledge, except exactly as the 
individual exists, or nothing known of the absolute being of any- 
thing. 

And so of mental operations or affections; we say we learn 
things from others, as that a square has four sides and four right 
angles ; but when we learn this or anything else, we only find that 
we possessed the elements of a corresponding idea, unknown to 
ourselves. In other words, we develop to our own recognition 
what we already have in mind, brought out and combined in cor- 



22 

respondence with the pattern presented or calculation made. And 
no matter how many the improved facilities for learning wonderful 
things, nor how feeble, clear, or dull the mind is, the material and 
powers possessed in thought, must be the same in the mind under- 
standing anything as that which is expressed in the thing under- 
stood. 

You may think this theory untenable, or find it hard to harmo- 
nize it with the fact of progressive accumulations of knowledge from 
infancy up. But we refer to power in act, simultaneous in time, 
with what calls it out in likeness. And till the mental power has 
grown by use of any faculty equal to the conception involved in 
what you strive to learn, you cannot learn it ; or you can learn a 
thing only partially or perfectly, just as your power possessed is 
partial or perfect. 

We might continue as to the relative effects of the sublime and 
beautiful ; but this will suffice to illustrate the fact that no man can 
ever know any of God's attributes, except so far as he may have 
evidence of those that are in himself. He can neither know, nor 
adequately co: ceive of anything, except in the progress of his own 
natural powers by means of a few attributes, and hence can never 
comprehend nor form any adequate conception of absolute self- 
existence, with infinity of attributes without beginning, and without 
finite relations, or relation to finite forms. But for this reason to 
deny the necessity of such existence, as demonstrated by creation, 
is the very top of egotistic madness. 

The best humanity can do is to have a consistent, honest theory, 
whereby the little that we do know may not be denied to pacify 
inherited superstition ; whereby to silence the atheism of science as 
well as ignorance ; a system by which our own existence asserts the 
existence of God, by which a small intelligence may not assume to 
be greater than the Intelligence in which it is, by which the impedi- 
ments of religious fiction are removed, and by which our life may 
be a joy of better works, for the highest benefit of man. 

Because they wish not to recognize by faith the Being they are 
in, or because others follow God in absurd ways, through a wilder- 
ness of errors, or because an atheist is unable to find Him in the 
works of nature, fools have said in practice or in heart, "there is 
no God." And a multitude of honest, thinking people, who are 
neither fools nor parrots of Paine or Ingersoll, are also in the dark- 
ness of doubt. 

The churches dare not take grounds broad enough to answer the 



23 

logic of an atheist like Ingersoll. Why don't the Beechers, the 
Talmages, the Lorimers, and every honest priest or preacher, meet 
the demand of reason, with a more consistent, better account of the 
God they worship ? Is it because humanity has not outgrown the 
necessity of some artificial hell ? because it has not outgrown the 
need of a personal devil and a personal God like man ? because it 
is not yet wise enough, nor good enough, nor brave enough, to be 
taught the sacred truth of its own divinity as it is in Substance — of 
its own responsibility as it is in flesh ? or is it because they fear 
to damage the platform from which they have done the preaching 
of a lifetime ? 

If reputation or the reward of fashion must be lost by the pur- 
suit of truth, let them go. Cross the road. Walk the margin of a 
nobler way and broader view. Study by dogmatics less, by reason 
more, and preach this truth — God's grace is in you all alike whose 
lives are pure, who love all good, resist all evil, succor the needy, 
and defend the weak, whether professors of the Christian religion 
or professors of no religion at all. 

By the light of reason and by the reason of faith, what do we 
conceive God to be? That partial, jealous, changeable, bloodthirsty 
god of Jewish history, has passed away. The better ideal of Chris- 
tianity improves just as humanity improves. And by the widest 
reach of enlightened reason, we will come to conceive of God as 
Absolute Spirit, involving the essence of Substance without form, 
but without which no universe could be. What do we mean by 
absolute ? We mean self-existent, unconditional being, without 
beginning or cause, free from effect, or affected by nothing in the 
relative universe ; and hence unknowable by man, because. of ina- 
bility to know itself by any finite means. 

Since human mind can only conceive of what is beyond its limit 
of cognizance by forms that are within it, let us try to approach a 
conception of mode by the form of a circle. As the circle infinite 
involves all circles and all other forms within it, while it has no 
conceivable limit or relation to any one involved, so of God, involv- 
ing all things and all attributes. And if it be urged again, that 
finite things, or ideas, in infinite extension of mind, as God's attri- 
butes, must extend in relations infinite or unknowable, we come no 
less, but more forcibly (as to the mode of space), to realize the 
necessity of a Unity Absolute in which they are. 

Absolute Being then, depends not on anything nor any condition 
of things ; nor can it be affected, responsibly or otherwise, by any 



24 

of the relations in creation, that flow in endless variety of form 
from the concurrence of attributes in mind and matter. 

Earth, and all the shining millions that revolve in space, are no 
more absolute and free than the drops of blood in a human body. 
Though all those orbs took fire and passed away in a universe of 
flame, Intelligence Absolute would still remain unchanged. 

To reason otherwise were to reduce all to absurdity; for insep- 
arable from absoluteness in power and perfection must also be 
unchangeableness ; whereas all the forms of matter are forever 
changing. And moreover, the absolute power of Spirit, involving 
Substance in essence, cannot be conceived as making itself other 
than it is, unless we admit that the indestructible could destroy 
itself, or that God could limit and destroy His own absolute immu- 
tability, or His own nature, and become another being at pleasure. 
This proposition is too absurd and contradictory for a moment's 
notice. It assumes a will power that could destroy the laws of 
positive existence in which it is. There is, however, a class of rea- 
soners who deny the absolute infinity of God, because there appears 
to be no omnipotent will able to defeat or destroy the universal 
laws of His own nature, to prevent evil. In other words, they claim 
He is not infinite or absolute, because He is not finite, or capable 
of arbitrary control like a man ! This is simply preposterous. But 
to maintain their theory, they say that force and matter being co-ex- 
istent, the fixed quantity or limit of force in matter proves the lim- 
itation of matter and motion, and hence the limitation of space, 
with which it is said matter must be co-extensive. Therefore, the 
universe is said to be finite, and hence there is no reason to sup- 
pose that God is necessarily infinite. As to this argument, we will 
only say that the fixed properties, modes, or parts in extension, 
have no more relation to extension itself, whether as to force, mat- 
ter, motion, or space, than the colors we see on a piece of cloth 
have to the unknown extent of the piece. Material forms and those 
forces that are everywhere proportioned alike in matter, may enter 
into the measurement of our conceptions of infinitude ; but, like 
those conceptions themselves, can bear no relation to immeasura- 
ble space, which we call infinite for many reasons, the sum total of 
which is, it is impossible to conceive of its limit. 

And only look at what other difficulties are arrived at from any 
such misconception of God, as His being a relative creator, con- 
sciously responsible throughout for his creation, but unable of will, 
to direct the universal details of justice. Every misdirection of 



25 

matter, every conflict of laws, every cry of anguish, every discord 
and pain of innocent life, every wrong upon his people, every vic- 
tory of unholy might over right, must be allowed to affect Him. 
So, instead of being absolute and free, He would be made to seem 
an inexpressibly unfortunate originator of misfortunes as well as 
joys, changeably affected by what we call good and bad, order and 
discord, on account of our relative personal existence. A greater 
absurdity than this can hardly be arrived at. 

To illustrate our meaning, let us speak further of that common 
error as to will which would reduce God to a relative being. The 
word will is used in reference to God, for want of some better word, 
to express the idea of an immutable moral force in absolute exist- 
ence. By this the world has been greatly misled. So far as we can 
know of it, will is a product of mental powers, dependent upon 
organism for being known, though not so dependent — like the 
gods of Ingersoll — for actual lineal existence. 

As humanly related, or known, will is a form of thought, thought 
a form of mind, mind a form of Thinking Being ; and no such 
known form can possibly exist as a part of such Absolute Being, 
any more than the form of Earth, or the form of man. 

Will, as decided by any relation of powers, to do, or forbear 
doing anything, has reference to the accomplishment of some object. 
But inasmuch as God is the infinite of accomplishments, to whom 
nothing is unknown, discoverable, or undone, there is no need nor 
possibility of thought or will, in any such form or direction, accord- 
ing to any human understanding of those words. Will, in act of 
thought, made or determined by preponderance of force, or choice, 
is the only way we are conscious of it as anything definable of rea- 
son. And yet, not because it is thus necessarily unknown to us as 
a power in itself absolute, or in every idea outside of organism, do 
we admit or declare its non-existence as such; but what we assert is 
this : all ideas, wills, and forms of thought, and all those minds that 
act by such forms, can no more involve Absolute Thinking Being 
than your image, reflected from a mirror into your eyes by sunlight, 
involves the essential essence of sunshine. 

In the ignorant ages of man, he ascribes nearly every effect in 
nature to an act of divine will, such as he himself is conscious of, 
only on a more perfect universal plan, perhaps. But it is the glory, 
solace, and firm reliance of enlightened men, to feel that nothing 
depends upon any uncertain chance of divine favor ; that God's 
universal laws must be followed in glad submission to enjoy their 
fruits in pleasure, their consolation in pain. 



26 

Now it may be inquired how Absolute Being can properly be 
named Thinking, unless it thinks, and how it can think, unless by 
forms of thought. As before proved, how God understands Him- 
self without relation, is unknowable. But to see the perfect fitness 
of the name Thinking, it is only necessary to reflect that nothing 
appears to you unless as a manifestation of thought from thinking ; 
and that all the world, or humanity itself, with all its thoughts 
inclusive, is a like manifest form of thinking. In raising, milling, 
and baking wheat, it is changed into a hundred forms ; but the 
.wheaten being, of which they all are, remains the same. Com- 
pletely burnt up, it seems to be extinct, but the elements and idea 
in which it first germinated still remain, of Thinking Being the 
same as in previous forms, when we said they were of wheaten 
being. 

Or to make farther comparison of relative forms, to which we 
are limited, take light, electricity, and human thought, each one a 
relative attribute. Before the human attribute found and applied 
the other two to a thousand uses not seen in nature, the full 
capacity and power developed in those uses existed the same as 
now. And Thinking Being, as involving those forms or acts of 
thought, is still eternally the same perfect essence, that thinks not 
in form, or personality ; but is the Being itself of infinite Thinking 
in Substance, free from cause or effect, and no more involved 
in any form of thought or matter than if such form had never 
existed. 

If you sleep like a log, unconscious, dreamless, thoughtless, you 
are no less that form of Thinking Being than you were when awake 
and thinking. Regardless of change or condition, nothing can ever 
cease to be of Thinking Being. That which is of essence the attri- 
bute Thinking itself, involving all thought, in infinite infinities, 
can have no need nor possibility of thought in any sense that a 
human mind does, for it is itself all that it can be said to want or 
think. And so of all God's attributes ; every will in act, every form 
of the universe in act of power can in no wise be conceived of 
rationally, as coming from or involving God, but only as being 
involved in God. 

And this view only confirms the popular idea, no other way 
maintainable, of His unchangeable perfection. And so we come to 
say of all thoughts and wills; they must be relative, and cannot per- 
tain to absolute Thinking Being in any manner as they do to man. 
In fact, the moment we give to thought and will the character of 



27 

changeless perpetuity, they cease to be conceived of as thought and 
will, and we call them immutable laws of nature. The applica- 
tion and relative power of these we refer to as evidence of relative 
thinking, because in their perception and the production of effects 
by them, we say we think. 

Would it sound absurd to say of gravitation, that it is one of 
God's thoughts ? If Absolute Being can be said to think, verily, 
such must be its mode of thought, in those fixed laws by use of 
which we think and work. 

If a man is killed by falling from a house-top, or dropping into 
the sea, instead of rising from it, we say, " It was the will of God ; 
his time had come." And yet we do not assume any new volition 
in the spirit of things to cause it. The being of gravity force, 
regardless of all the relations within it, remains the same. So of 
light, heat, and all other powers in essence, of that omnific unity 
called God ; we do not call them thoughts or wills, but by changing 
our relations, or the relation of other things in the power of their 
being, we can change relative effects, after the manner of changing 
our thoughts. 

In this respect, it may indeed appear that such forces in action 
are related to each other throughout matter, as thoughts and wills 
are related in human mind, involving all things that are within 
their power. Extend the analogy by taking away personal limit 
from the attributes in man, and imagine some creature living in one 
of them, as we live in gravitation, or in all of them, as we do in the 
unity of God's unlimited attributes, and it will seem no wonder that 
man has declared himself made in the image of God, or in His 
idea. 

If egotism or priestcraft has made gods to resemble men in 
form, — if ignorant men make gods in a thousand other forms, as 
children, struggling up degrees that bound their view, take dolls for 
babies, — if every formal archetype of God conceivable has been 
destroyed as false and visionary, — it only proves the littleness of 
man, and touches not the fact or question of a necessary God 
Existence. 

Section VI. 

Touching again the logic of materialism, it says that God and 
nature are the same, for the universe could not have been made of 
nothing, because there was no nothing to make it of ; inasmuch as 
the Infinite God filled infinite space. It alleges, therefore, that the 



28 

infinite universe must have been, or been made of, the Infinite God; 
and that more than one thing in the same place, or more than one 
infinite, being impossible, they are necessarily one and the same. 

This statement, at first view, by sense of material measurement 
alone, so far as relates to extension, without reference to concurrent 
attributes in the same space, would seem to be true ; nor will it 
avail, in proof of difference, only to say that spirit infinitude is eter- 
nal, and has no form, while the material universe has form and 
divisibility ; for infinite matter, in esse, is also eternal, informal, 
and indivisible. To stop here, then, were apparently to concede 
the materialistic God, with the effect of blinding people as to the 
fact that extended matter alone, so far as we can know, or conceive 
of it, is only a single manner, means, or property of God's infin- 
itude ; of which it is agreed on all sides that two atoms cannot 
occupy the same space at the same time. 

Even within the limit of our senses, we find in one thing, in one 
place, in the same space, many attributes ; such as color, odor, heat, 
light, and electricity, added, in unity, to material texture. This fact 
ought to satisfy every one that there are other distinct properties, 
or attributes, co-extensive with matter; and that any one of them 
might just as reasonably be called God, on account of extension, as 
matter is. But the sophistry of atheism appeals to ignorance, by 
means of what is tangible ; and either assumes, or- leaves it to be 
inferred, that all powers, and all phenomena, are inherently of ma- 
teriality, and that, besides this, there are no co-equal infinities. 

If we were another order of beings, so constituted that forms of 
matter were unseen or unknown ; or, to put it otherwise, if forms 
were invisible, and only ideas known, it would come to be said, in 
the same manner, — Since there is an infinity of ideas, and there can 
be only one infinite, therefore what we call infinite mind is the 
same as God. 

Or, to assume no change of being like that, so far as relates to 
extension, or on account of omnipresent infinity, the same as claimed 
for matter, we might follow Herbert Spencer and declare that force 
is God. 

And thus we might go on, asserting the same of any infinite attri- 
bute, like gravitation, or electricity, or any adequate idea of which 
we may conceive ; calling it God, on account of infinite extension, 
with the same propriety that the universe can be called God. 

And so, indeed, possibly on this very theory, we find Mr. Inger- 
soll calling himself God, or " part of God." Balaam's ass might 



29 

just as properly have made the same claim for himself and fellows, 
if his speech had lasted ; otherwise we have that gentleman (Mr. 
Ingersoll) with a- god made exclusively of men, or a man-form god. 
In this case, what will he do with every other genus of nature? In 
any event, the skunk, rattlesnake, shark, baboon, and whale, can 
certainly be no formal partners of his in such a god ? The only 
escape is to have more gods from his factory, in place of those 
destroyed. Each different form and nature must have a god to suit 
it. In fact, the only reasonable outcome of his theory, on any basis 
of organism, is to have everything its own god, instead of making 
everything " a part of one god." And how Mr. Ingersoll can be 
" a part of god," or part of " an eating, thinking organism " that 
does not. exist, is verily the greatest puzzle of the age ! 

It would be just as reasonable, however, for him to assume being 
the whole God, because of his being, as an idea, an infinite attribute 
of God, as it would be to assume that the universe is God, on 
account of infinity. 

To be absolute, neither demands nor admits organism. And as to 
light, heat, electricity, gravitation, or like forces, we know not their 
substance, but only their effects, made manifest by material rela- 
tions, the same as we know everything else. And so of these, the 
same as of Mr. Ingersoll, we cannot say to what we know, behold 
God, or " part of God ! " for this were to limit Him as a dependent 
being, without substance, subject to an endless variety of changes, 
uses, and abuses. 

Until we can begin to conceive of numberless degrees and varie- 
ties of being unknowable, — of the eternality or infinity of co-exist- 
ent infinities, neither of which is the cause of the other, but all 
involved in Supreme Being, — we can no more approximate a true 
conception of an Absolute God, than those microscopic bioplasts 
who are busy at work building up every part in our bodies can con- 
ceive the being of man. But, nevertheless, we know enough to 
realize that such Being must necessarily exist, to account for what 
appears. 

Oh, what a little fool is man ! the infinitesimal bioplast of God ! 
to presume, like Robert Ingersoll, that there is nothing different 
from what his vision reveals by introspection of nature, by reason, 
science, microscope and telescope ! When that man declares "there 
is nothing superior to nature," that "nature embraces all there is of 
God," — swelling like the fabled frog who tried to be as big as an 
ox, — why does he not add, Since there is nothing superior to me, 



3Q 

I embrace all there is of nature, and therefore I am all there is of 
God? If the falsities and horrors of religious fanaticism make 
us ashamed of our savage race, such mad assumption, such loss 
of reason, such supreme conceit upon the other side, has only- 
added shame to shame. 

Tell us how and what you know of nature. How much more do 
you know nature on the material side of being, than others know 
God on the spiritual side ? Is there nothing where you think noth- 
ing is, because you know nothing there ? % Make and think of a 
perfect vacuum, so far as you can know of it. Is not your idea in 
the vacuum, the same as in yourself when your thought involves it? 
And do not ideas, like the atoms of a magnet, who hitch their little 
chains upon a piece of iron, right through a vacuum, or within it, 
require a coarser medium than nothing to enable their extension, 
the same as odor requires air? Is the opposite of what you know 
as something, or the idea of its absence, nothing ? Is God to you 
another word for nothing ? What is this but another word for 
something beyond what you know, ad infinitum, absolute ? 

In its common sense this word nothing has long enough misled 
the world. It signifies an absence impossible, except as to what 
you know ; and even of this, the idea remains in the scope of your 
mental power, or you could not think of its absence. If you could 
see by means of magnetic power, that passes, unimpeded, in the 
dark, through metals, rocks, and timbers, looking through the earth 
as through the air, it were not impossible that you might have come 
to preach, — There's no such world as this, because I fail to see it. 

Trying to exclude the Substance of God from nature, let Science 
begin to experiment, and make the most perfect vacuum possible. 
Electricity refuses to appear in it, or to pass through it. You say 
there is nothing there to conduct it. Now, placing a thermometer 
inside the glass receiver, you exhaust the air, move it into the sun- 
shine, or a place of greater heat, and you learn that there was 
something there, more subtile than electricity could use, for light 
and heat produce the same effect they do outside of it. Or do you 
wish to find within it a means of power as certain as the ropes and 
cables of a ship ? let loose a weight from the top of it, and see how 
fast the unknown chain of gravitation pulls it down. 

Here in vacuo is nothing, that proves to be something unknown. 
Do you believe in its existence ? Is a man worse evidence to him- 
self than a vacuum affords to you ? Because you cannot see the 
spiritual magnet, thermometer, and light inside of him, that speak 



3i 

of God, or because the power he feels is not subject to chemical 
analysis, or scientific explanation, would anything but presumpt- 
ive impudence assert that no such power exists ? Now what en- 
ables or involves that power in vacuo, which enables the effect of 
other powers ? Do you still say nothing beyond that first nothing, 
of which you are forced to admit the enabling power, by proof of 
gravity, light, heat, and magnetism? Not demanding, as atheism 
does, an impossible proof, we concede you another degree of empti- 
ness (hardly necessary), or a vacuum inside the first vacuum, that 
shall exclude the means of those visible effects referred to. Light, 
heat, chemical effect, magnetism, must cease to appear. Even gravi- 
tation, which La Place says is fifty million times faster than light, 
and which you shall be supposed to know as readily as you would 
a race-horse, is no longer manifest. Now conceive an utter absence 
of the unknown means, which you had perfect faith was there 
before. By successive relations in mind, to such a something un- 
known, the very idea of this nothing, in itself, or in you, proves it 
to be something of exhaustless mind, the same as everything else, 
descending from infinite refinements, in the unknown Substance of 
Thinking Being. 

All that you know, comes of this spirit substance which you call 
nothing, till you get a hint of its essence by some relative form. 
This spirit of life, whereby you think, whereof you are, is the ante- 
cedent maker of everything, from the calfskin on your feet to the 
clothes upon your back, from animalcule to whale, from coral reef 
to the great globe itself. By what is sunshine, water, grass, and air 
made into calf-skin, wool, or any of a thousand patterns, full of 
beauty, woven in the living loom of nature ? By what is the 
invisible freightage of the air made into metals, minerals, and earth, 
or earth into lovely vegetation, crowned with fruitful trees? By 
what do gases become liquids and solids, through the life of nature, 
when they refuse to liquefy by artificial process, under tons of 
pressure and two hundred and twenty degrees of cold, as in the case 
of oxygen, hydrogen, or nitrogen ? By what do two such gases fur- 
nish all the living, sparkling water of the world ? 

Atheism tells us not by any intelligence in nature superior to the 
intelligence of man, or even superior to the nature that is beneath 
man ! In fact, it goes another step, and says that such intelligence 
is not intelligence, because it is perfectly natural, and could not be 
otherwise. In other words, such natural intelligence, with all its 
vastness of vivific power, outside the finite forms of beauty that it 



32 

makes, is only blind, hap-hazard ignorance ! And therefore there 
is no God ! Was ever reason so disgraced in any other cause ? Is 
that the sort of logic used by our Jupiter of the rostrum, Mr. Inger- 
soll, to enlighten courts and juries, where he practices the law ? Is 
that the way he proves no cause of action, no main intention above 
concurrent benefits or injuries ? Is that the way intelligence, too 
natural, argues the disproof of wills unwritten, attested by many 
witnesses " who still have the cheerful habit of living? " Would he 
fight a patent claim, involving only the use of a copy from eternal 
nature, on the ground of no intelligence on that account? If not, 
must he presume that such intelligence of use begins with the dis- 
coverer, who is said to be only another piece of the same natural 
intelligence, called ignorance ? 

To conclude the farcical absurdity of such evolution from nature, 
it says this : non-intelligence in general becomes intelligence in par- 
ticular by the creature whom non-intelligence made ; and so, from 
darkness we get light ! from blindness we get sight ! 

It is allowed to be the most wonderful of miracles, how anything 
does itself, or brings itself into existence from non-existence ! but 
then, the gullet-ability of any scientific atheist is enough greater 
than that required of Jonah's whale in swallowing Jonah, to. swal- 
low the whale himself, and every other miraculous work, if it is only 
called the work of nature, and not the work of God. 

Beyond the short range philosophy of such science, by every 
change of form, by every increasing circle of existence, all nature 
declares itself to be an involution of Thinking Being. All forms of 
nature are in the formative ideas of spirit, but nature cannot be 
known as such till spirit has made it knowable. 

With proof complete in other parts of this argument of such a 
necessity, we say then, that spirit existence, involving nature as the 
effect of its ideas, is involved in God. On the contrary, reasoning 
from nature as the cause of all phenomena, atheism says that nature, 
involving the spirit of life, must involve God, if any God were pos- 
sible ; chiefly because, so far as we know, everything is found to be 
natural. This reason is born of shallow sounding, between the 
points of appearance and disappearance, in the boundless sea of 
force. In the control of unknown laws, new phenomena appear, 
opposed to anything we knew before as natural, — nature itself 
comes out from the invisible, — a world is made,*an asteroid is 
added to the universe, a comet shoots the passage of the Milky 



33 

Way, on circuit of a thousand years through space (the pleasure 
train, for aught we know, of lives intangible), and still the cry comes 
up from that asylum of scientific ignorance, " behold the unknown 
potentialities of nature ! " 

A mind that so conceives these wonders of the universe, as not 
included in the intelligence of Supreme Power, cherishes a plan far 
more absurd, a faith more blind, than Buddhist, Jew or Christian. 

Mr. Ingersoll inquires, " if God wants to be known, why does he 
not advertise ? " This is a modest query for a disciple of Darwin's 
monkey theory ! Why did not the Creator, who Darwin assumes 
breathed life into the first few forms, advertise Himself to the tad- 
pole, the porpoise, and the bat? Why does not a father advertise 
himself to his baby before its eyes are open to the light ? Why not 
demand that man be made equal to God, if there is one, so as to 
be able to comprehend Him ? 

If one small life, or living forest leaf, or page of rock upon the 
mountain shelves, or Earth itself, reveals to Mr. Ingersoll the need 
of no intelligence beyond his own, it is because he reads what is 
contained in the dot of one I, or the word of one world, for all 
there is. God's grand perpetual-motion press is nature. Its million 
kinds of type are infusoria, of which millions in one heap do not 
equal a grain of mustard seed. Berlin slate is approximately proven 
to be made of forty-one thousand million of those animalcular types 
to the cubic inch. The mineral atoms in a corpuscle of blood, 
like the atoms of a magnetic ray, are not made visible by aid of 
any microscope. Is it strange, then, that he fails to read with nat- 
ural eyes, all that is advertised of God's omnific Substance to the 
eye of faith ? 

Because each part of nature has its own inherent law, involved 
in other laws ; because a self-contradiction in nature is impossible, 
and no form can be the self-same and different both at once ; be- 
cause black is never possibly white, nor a square five-sided, nor a 
circle with unequal diameters, nor a string with only one end, nor 
truth false ; because no power can make a two-year old steer in a 
minute, nor enable Mr. Ingersoll to fathom space with a ten-foot 
pole, — he infers no need, nor evidence of God ! This were the 
same as denying the intelligence of geometric demonstration by 
forms, because the self-evident axioms involved are unalterably 
true. It is worse than confounding the intelligence of law with 
the letters of which it is composed. He confounds form with Sub- 



34 

stance — the nature of a circle with the power that enables his idea 
of it — the form of stick or string with the power of life that pro- 
duced it. 

When he argues the absence of self-contradictory powers in nat- 
ure as the absence of God, he only proclaims this woful fact : that 
nothing but the demonstration of a God that is utterly impossible, 
will ever convince him of a possible God ! In this respect he is not 
altogether unlike a large class of his opponents who are waiting in 
doubt for the same kind of a demonstration. 

He says " no one infers a God from the simple, from the known, 
but from the complex, from the unknown." We have already 
shown that the simple elements, as well as their combinations, 
prove the necessity of Thinking Being ; and would refer the reader 
to the latter part of division II. 

That common things come to be esteemed of no account, as evi- 
dence of God, is too true. The rationale of the universe in Think- 
ing Being is declared, in degree, by a grain of sand, a blade of 
grass, a rain-drop, no less than by the great globe itself. We live, 
and breathe, and have our being by God, has come to mean no 
more than simply this : we live by air, water, and food ; when, in 
fact, every atom, and invisible interstice between atoms, in the 
process of transmutation into flesh, bone, nerve, and tissue, is nec- 
essarily possessed and filled by the inexplicable spirit of life. 

Everything produced by visible cause, or means, is called simple ; 
when, in fact, not a single thing in all nature is produced without 
other means besides those we see and know. 

The expressions of power by the sympathetic affection of plants, 
animals, human minds, worlds, — the simple actions of feeling, 
hearing, tasting, and seeing, are accounted as understood. Reflect 
and see. In its utmost simplicity, not a single one can be ex- 
plained by what is visibly known. A dozen sounds of music 
strike your ear with a single blow : tone, key, force, discord, each 
instrument is heard in union, and in severalty, at once ! Many 
effects are in the same place at the same time. Is here no miracle ? 
Does this not shame those little temporary miracles, whereby a law 
is said to be made self-contradictory? You see things reflected 
through air and water. Do you say that's nothing ? If the clair- 
voyant sees, without eyes, through the skull, or if one could see 
through a rock by magnetic rays, the same as through the air by 
rays of light, you would say these things are wonderful. And yet 



35 

the ordinary seeing is capable of no better explanation than these 
would be. 

I will never forget the disbelief and wonder that took me to 
western Pennsylvania to see the first appearance of petroleum. 
And, even now, I find it hard to realize the fact that simple water, 
or the air we breathe, is no less miraculous than floods of oil. 

When Science does things seemingly impossible ; as, for example, 
when it enables music to be heard a hundred miles away, or con- 
verts pure linseed oil into the best of rubber, the human mind is 
full of wonder and praise for its genius. But only refer, with praise, 
to any greater mystery, like simple sugar, turpentine, or rubber, in 
the sap of tree and cane, by the power of God, and some one says : 
"O, bah! the work of nature; I understood that when I was a child ; 
give us a new miracle." Why, in the name of common sense, is 
human genius thus gratefully applauded, while Supreme Genius is 
derided or denied ? If Science were to make a diamond, or force 
accretions of gold from invisible refinements in the dust, or in a sun- 
set cloud, where it did not appear, as Edison was once said to do by 
electricity from mine tailings where the microscope failed to dis- 
cover it ; if a mineral insect could be produced from electrified 
stone, in a chemical saturation, made of powdered flint and carbon- 
ate of potassa, fused by intense heat, with additions of water and 
hvdrochloric acid, as the chemist Andrew Crosse once said he had 
done ; if all these, and yet a thousand things more wonderful could 
be done by science, they would but augment the evidence already 
found in the most simple elements, by more extended proof, of the 
omnific power involving and enabling such effects. 

Because something is not done, or known to be, without material 
means, it is thought a simple thing; and the conceit of atheistic 
Science is so immense that when it traces a few steps the visible 
means connecting cause and effect, it vainly fancies the explanation 
complete, and says, No thanks to this, or this, or this, for it could 
not be otherwise than it is, simply because it is not. But straight- 
way this Science sets about changing one thing into another, and 
converting one force into another, blindly forgetful of the fact that 
no such change or interchange of properties, no union, nor control 
of diverse kinships, and no universal union of all nature, could pos- 
sibly be, without an essential Substance, common to all, in which. 
and of which, all exist. 



36 



Conclusion. 

We claim to have demonstrated, in the course of this argument, 
the all-pervading, all-encompassing Mind of Deity, dependent upon 
no "organism " for existence. 

Instead of nature being the creative possessor of all power, em- 
bracing all matter, all force, all attributes, as claimed by Mr. Inger- 
soll, we have proved directly the reverse, by showing that all nature, 
so far as it is possible to pursue its evolution and involution in the 
power of ideas and laws, is involved in the possessive, enabling 
power of Thinking Being. 

To maintain our position, we have not found it necessary to deny 
those assumptions or" science, that have any color of truth, upon 
which atheism is based. The usual view of miracles, as violating 
the supreme reign of law, furnishes the most conspicuous target for 
atheism, — a worse than useless argument in proof of God, a boom- 
erang of logic that destroys the whole plan of its projector. After 
wasting floods of eloquence in denial of such unessential miracles, 
Mr. Ingersoll says : " Until one is performed, there can be no evi- 
dence of the existence of any power superior to nature." This 
assertion, which has been proven to be utterly false, would seem to 
be more befitting his " rude savage, who always demands the evi- 
dence of miracles." It were infinitely less absurd to say that un- 
less a man can change his big toe into a bird, by the wink of his 
eye, there is no evidence of any power in the man superior to the 
nature of the said toe. 

Mr. Ingersoll declares : "There is a war between science and faith 
— an irrepressible conflict between religion and science, and they 
cannot peaceably occupy the same brain, nor the same world." 
Such a conclusion I deny. Far deeper than its creed formalities, 
systems, or foibles of belief, the essence of the Christian religion 
is the joyful practice of godliness, a desire for the highest truth. 
So if truth be the aim of science, what seems a conflict is only the 
repressible counterfeit of war. 

Theories may change every day; but, whether religious or sci- 
entific, if their only object is truth, war is unnecessary. Full 
of anathemas, bigotry and fear, against the forward movement of 
the world, if men have won the world's contempt by abusing 
the Galileos of science, it only proves a succession of errors 
along the field of religion, not unlike the many errors of trial 



37 

through which scientific faith has come to the grandest achieve- 
ments of its genius. 

Suppose science to have had and used the same power of perse- 
cuting intolerance, to enforce an error against religious theories, 
that religion once used against the march of science : ought that, 
in reason, to discredit all the aims, and works, — the joys, the com- 
forts, and the benefits of science, forever after? 

The priest of science and the priest of God may be one man in 
perfect harmony; and such must be the coming teacher of the world, 
whose prayer is truth, whose motto is advance. 

When bigotry no more decries the pursuit of science, and the 
fool of science mocks the pursuit of God no more ; when godliness 
shall find delight in the utmost reach of science ; when the reverent 
wonder of the people is sustained by appeals to faith through rea- 
son, — by display of miracles in every element, in pebble, plant, or 
fish, in dew-drop, bird, or beast ; when the deep stupendous miracle 
of Power that swings the universe, and blossoms in the rose, shall 
thus be made to blossom in the human heart, — then, and not till 
then, will the churches fill with students, and the increase of athe- 
ism stop. 



Address orders for this book to the author, 
P. O. Box No. 3469, Boston, Mass. 

In preparation, a Supplementary Monograph — 
The Chemistry of Ideas ; and also a Lecture, en- 
titled The Philippic of Science, Against the Ministry 
of IngersolL 



-\ 





H 



^*i 



^JBT 





1 






■ 



H 






■ 



